LinkedIn now boasts 200M members in 200 countries

LinkedIn announced this morning that it has crossed a big threshold: a userbase of 200 million members from all around the world.

The company says its network of professionals come from 200 countries all over the globe and use the site in 19 different languages; more than half of all LinkedIn users live outside the United States.

“It’s been amazing to see how our members have been able to transform their professional lives through LinkedIn,” said the company’s product SVP, Deep Nishar, in a blog post this morning.

“You truly grasp the power of LinkedIn when you start to focus on these individual success stories.”

Granted, these 200 million users might seem paltry next to Facebook’s billion-strong userbase, Twitter’s army of 500 million, and newcomer Google+’s userbase of 500 million registered and 235 million active users. However, LinkedIn has offered and incentivized paid memberships for years — an important feature that accounts for one fifth of the company’s revenue. Once your users are in the hundreds of millions, having them pay for their accounts starts to add up.

The company had its IPO in May 2011. With shares originally priced between $42 and $45, the shares’ value quickly shot up and maintained growth through a dramatic rough patch for tech stocks. Today, shares are trading at $112 as of this writing.

Take a look at this comparison of newer tech stocks over the past year:

Perhaps 200 million isn’t so paltry after all. Here’s a celebratory infographic from LinkedIn: